There are self-help books and expensive seminars that can give powerful inspiration to raise your career profile, be a better leader or grow your business.
Then there’s the free app that could potentially be a game-changer in less than three minutes.
The ambitious can gain bits of advice from more than 100 corporate gurus, best-selling authors and motivational speakers with Audvisor, a library of curated expertise brought to IOS and Android users in short audio clips.
An Audvisor user can choose from a variety of topics and experts and create a playlist of their favorite pearls of wisdom. Since launching during the first week in March, Audvisor averages about 2,000 downloads a day, said co-founder Michael Martin.
“When you have a job, you’re looking to get ahead and you ask yourself ‘How do I separate myself from the rest of the pack,’ ” Martin told Cult of Mac. “These insights help people do that. We have some experts who get three and $4,000 an hour . . . and they’re giving exclusive wisdom inside our app absolutely free.”
The app contains just a couple of simple steps to summon the advice, a library of around 1,000 different talking points, all under three minutes long. The menu button brings to a screen that gives you a choice of searching through a list of topics or experts.
There are 14 broad topics, including career advancement, effective leadership, becoming a better person, capitalizing on social media and how to serve customers. From there, there is a list of more specific topics with headlines, like The Art of Business, Personalization is Important, Road Map vs. Compass and Kindness Goes a Long Way.
Under the “Experts” heading are Audvisor’s contributors with each containing a short biography and anywhere from a few to 25 mini-lectures. There are tracks that are under a minute but most average about two and a half minutes.
“We have experts who are New York Times best-selling authors and we have experts who have never wrote a book or a blog but have a lot of wisdom to share,” said Martin, who co-found Audvisor with Rajesh Setty.
Among the experts on the list are Dilip Saraf, rated the No. 1 career coach by LinkedIn; prolific author, entrepreneur and marketing guru Seth Godin, emotional intelligence expert Colleen Stanley, former NFL player Anthony Trucks and Pamela Slim, author of Body of Work: Finding the Thread That Ties Your Story Together and Escape from Cubicle Nation.
Martin said interviews are designed to elicit answers that can be broken down into several tracks of wisdom. Some of the interviews are done via Skype while others are recorded in Audvisor’s New York office.
Martin said there is a hunger for growth but less time to read lengthy books or attend a two-day business seminar.
“Our attention span is very short right now,” he said. “If you try to tell a joke about three guys walking into a bar, the other person is going to say, ‘Can you make it two? I don’t have a lot of time.’ When we talk to people, we ask them if they would take two minutes to listen to something and the answer was yes.”
Slim, author, business consultant and a former director of training and development at Barclays Global Investors, said she and others contributing to Audvisor have experience distilling important concepts
“My zone is the world of work and people are looking for the it. They want to find that thing that is going to make them excited,” Slim told Cult of Mac. “Once they gain that clarity, they can address the bigger questions.”
In addition to the number of downloads, Martin said he is encouraged by some early feedback, like Twitter responses to Slim’s advice and others, and one company whose CEO makes his team leaders listen to one every day that becomes the foundation of the daily management meeting.
Audvisor will always be free, Martin said, but a “plus” version is under development, bringing more experts and topics for a monthly fee.
